A Great Future Does Not Require A Great Past: Who You Become Is Up To You
Your past may be riddled with indiscretions and mistakes. Living life can be messy. On a positive note, you have experienced, and hopefully, learned, a lot.
Consider the alternative — your past may look pristine and perfect, while, underneath your shiny exterior, you loathe your square-boxed life. Both of these scenarios are a “past,” but neither of them determine your fate or future — you do!
You are not chained to your past. Your past is just that — passed — gone. Or, is it? We live our life in a loop of habits, patterns and memories that are formed very early in our lives. We are wired to repeat them. We repeat the same platitudes, experience the same relationships, and say things like, “story of my life.” You are correct — that is the story of your life. Now it’s time to get out your pen and rewrite it if you don’t like what you see.
We are also wired to change our habits and patterns.
Three tools below will help you to rewrite your life:
- Awareness. Be aware that you are repeating patterns by paying attention to your thoughts and behaviors.
2. The desire and willingness to change. If you want to change badly enough, you will override old habits or patterns with your new, desired result.
3. Focused intention. Focusing your mind on the new thought makes it stronger than the old habits. This forms new neural networks that eventually create your new, desired habits and patterns.
Know Where You’re Headed
Your past is like a compass that points to where you are headed. If you don’t like the direction in which you are headed, it’s time to change course. It’s simple, but it isn’t always easy to do.
Tug of War Between Your Past and Present
Many people live their lives under the weight of being judged by their past. As children, we want to please our parents. Childhood is designed like a reward system. When you are a good girl or a good boy, you are praised. When you are a bad girl or a bad boy, you are sentenced to spend the day in the corner or in your room, isolated from the rest of the tribe. Or maybe you were simply ignored by parents who had to work, or who had addictions, or who impacted you with a plethora of other psychological, behavioral, or physical abuses and traumas. Those events created, strengthened and reinforced the beliefs, habits and patterns that you have today. They continue to have a profound effect on the choices you make, on your relationships and in your career. Your habits are carved with deep grooves into your psyche by neural networks. These grooves determine how you behave with others based on beliefs that you hold from those tender, formative years.
Candy’s Story
On a recent podcast, I featured a guest named Candy. Candy grew up with a mother who was addicted to drugs and alcohol. For as long as she could remember, her mother prostituted herself to buy drugs. In Candy’s first five and a half years of life, she witnessed things that most people fear to imagine. She was molested by one of her mother’s “Johns.” Although her mother was an addict, Candy never stopped loving her. Her mother’s drinking caused her to lose sight of her kids repeatedly, disappointing Candy and forming an emotional connection (neural network) for Candy regarding relationships.
When Candy was just five and a half years old, her father and mother officially divorced, and Candy moved in with her dad. From age seven onward, visitation with her mother consisted of only seeing her and spending time with her in front of Candy’s house. Her mother died from cirrhosis of the liver when Candy was 19, leaving a hole in her heart the size of Texas. Her mother’s death caused Candy to wonder how parents could treat a small, vulnerable child this way. This loop kept playing out over and over again in her relationships.
When I first started working with Candy, she was plagued by the thought that people knew her history — specifically, that her mother was a prostitute. She would say, “I feel like people look at me and say, “There’s the whore’s kid. She’s probably a whore like her mom.” That hit home for me, as I had not considered that thought even once. I thought to myself, “Holy shit, how does someone live through that and come out ok?”
Candy is driven and has a very successful career. She came to me because she specifically wanted to change her relationship with men. First, she had to decide what that would look like, and then change her thinking and how she related to men. I offered her a few tools and she devoured them. Her street smarts had given her a strong, heightened sense of intuition, but now, she had to learn to trust that intuition.
Candy naturally has the ability to rapidly take in information and understand people, energy and intention. Coupled with her desire to change, she rarely misses the mark. She has realized that change can often be uncomfortable, but she knows that she must be honest with herself in order to effect change. She messaged me, “This really hurts. Every bit of me wants to do what I have always done, but I know I can’t. I have to break the pattern. But, dang, it hurts.” Yet she always succeeds. She closes old doors, and new doors fly open. And then she walks through those new doors to discern if they lead to what she wants.
Understanding Choices
Candy was plagued by guilt that had carried over from her family and close relatives. Addiction is an illness. It is in the brain. Simplified, addiction formed by electrochemical signals that travel through a network in the brain called neurons. The networks form clusters. They fight competing neuronal clusters, and the strongest network wins. Supercharged by dopamine pathways, addiction mimics the reward system, similar to when your parents called you a good girl or boy or bad girl or boy. The dopamine pathways are reinforced and driven toward pleasure, creating the force behind “feeling good.” We can all relate to choosing pleasure over pain — especially psychological pain — and how a reward brings pleasure.
For example, imagine that you have to make a choice between a Reese’s peanut butter cup or an Almond Joy, but you love both. Your brain has already begun the process of making the decision the moment you laid your eyes on both of them. There is a literal fight in your brain as to which candy bar has brought more pleasure in the past. Whichever is stronger, wins.
Your brain takes over based on past experiences, and a decision is made for you based on neural networks which formed from a feeling. And you never even realized it was happening.
Awareness, Codependency and Choices
The scenario above explains why we choose codependent relationships. These networks were reinforced when you were a child. You learned that your relationships felt good or bad, or that good felt bad or bad felt good, but it felt like “home.” You may believe that this means you have no control, but you do. When you recognize what is happening, you can take control.
I repeat the term comfortably uncomfortable, and I talk a lot about bending reality. I know that it can be done, because I have done it, and I counsel and teach others to do it. The only thing you have to do is practice.
Candy’s Change
Candy’s progress was largely determined by her strongest mental state. She paid attention to what she was feeling first. Then she would turn to her mind. She changed her thoughts to change the way she felt. For example, Candy was dependent on a man’s validation. If he didn’t text or call, she’d feel insecure. Feeling insecure made her want to make contact with him. Making contact with him could quell her insecurity. But if he didn’t reply, it sent her spinning out of control, questioning her value. Candy recognized that she felt insecure because she didn’t feel valued. So, she began to validate herself. Through self-validation, she came to the realization that she really does value herself. The root cause of her problems was not being validated as a child.
Reframe It
Candy sought validation outside herself because it was a habit that had been created during her most formative years. Her first and closest caretaker relationship — the connection with her mother — didn’t provide the love she needed. Candy also watched her mother seek a form of validation from men. When Candy sought validation from men, she was attempting to recreate and relieve the need for her mother’s love and validation.
Candy and I worked on reframing her experiences. Within every painful experience is a seed of human triumph waiting to be discovered. “How will you decide to rise from the ashes?” I asked her. “How will you tell your story? Will you overcome or be overcome? Who holds the pen — you, or your fears?”
From there, Candy reframed her experiences and discovered her power — her self-worth. She liked who she was. She simply had to reframe the old patterns that challenged her, and begin to own her self-worth. She couldn’t believe that she had ever allowed anyone to treat her as less than that. It was as though she had shed an old skin.
Then Candy set her intention to find a partner, “A man that is into me is going to show me that he is there for me,” she said. “He will be consistent, available and committed.” Then, just like that, the universe delivered him into her lap. When you change, everything changes.
Your future is determined by you. It is true that your past can have a bearing on your future, but you can determine how that affects the outcome.
The changes that we make within ourselves affect everything else and everyone else. We are connected to everyone and everything in a grand, unseen network of energy. Please love yourself more, for when you do, that love spreads to others.
